Several publications are referenced in this application. The cited references describe the state of the art to which this invention pertains and are hereby incorporated by reference.
There are a variety of on-line networking services that allow users to learn about other users and possibly network with such other users, such as Facebook.com, MySpace.com, Friendster.com, Orkut.com, and Plaxo.com. An online social network allows an individual to easily keep track of relationships that the individual has with other people by leveraging the Internet. Evite.com allows users to send invitations for specific events to specific individuals selected by the user. Other invite or event related sites include Meetup, Meeting Wave, Pinng, MyPunchBowl, Amiando, Invitastic, Madelt, Socializr, ipartee, Renkoo, ImThere, Skobee, Zvents, Zoji, and Windows Live Events. MeetingWave.com is an online tool for networking off-line for business or social purposes. The site provides a way for users to arrange meetings with the people they'd like to meet—anytime, anyplace—whether traveling or near home or work while providing control, privacy and flexibility.
Although an ever-growing number of commercial and social transactions take place across electronic mediums, little if anything has been done to assist users of those mediums ensure that other parties to those transactions are who they purport to be. That is, users of Web-based social networking sites, job sites, dating sites, chat rooms, blog comments, review sites, rating sites, consumer-to-consumer commercial transactions sites, and a myriad of other, so-called Web 2.0 sites, have few, if any, means for verifying the identities or attributes of those they interact with in the on-line world. Telephone calls with caller ID provide confidence that the telephone call is coming from the displayed phone number, because your phone service provider has authenticated the caller's identity. But there is no established means to authenticate the identity or background information of someone who contacts you through the Internet. With the prevalence of social networking websites, over 500 million people are registered on just the five most popular sites. Due to the total anonymity of the Internet, this is a serious problem for all users of the Internet; there are unlimited opportunities for predators to impersonate someone. The increasing adoption of online social networks has increased issues relating to identity theft, privacy and fraud.
Users connected to a network (e.g. internet, mobile, instant messaging, etc.) often use fictitious screen names as unique handles (“usernames” or “screen names”) to identify themselves to other users. An individual user may have multiple screen names. Users communicate online with these fictitious identities either in online text messages, referred to as instant messaging (IM), or in voice, with special voice over IP software applications like Skype, without knowing the true identities of the other parties. This protects the identity of the users as long as users do not give out any private information, such as full names, telephone numbers, email address or other contact information. Anonymity is a significant driver for Internet use. As a result, social networking sites are resistant to any solution that reveals the identity of its users or in any way jeopardizes the anonymity. However, without some form of verification of a user's profile information or published or shared personal characteristics, some users are enabled to falsely portray their own personal characteristics, for example, occupation, education, group membership, affiliations, etc.
US Patent Publication No. 20090265639 to Shuster, hereby incorporated by reference (particularly the systems and methods described in paragraphs 0008-0048), describes systems and methods for verifying user personal characteristics. The method includes: receiving from a first user on a social network personal information about the first user; requesting veracity feedback of one or more items of personal information of the first user from a plurality of users on the social network; assigning a confidence score (also called a veracity score) to each item of personal information based on respective veracity feedback provided by one or more of the plurality of users; and publishing, on the social network, the confidence score of the first user's personal information to one or more users of the social network. One disadvantage of this method and system of generating a “veracity score” for each user is it requires active participation and scoring by other users. Moreover, such a system can be gamed by a single user signing up multiple user accounts and inflating the user's “veracity score”.
Existing technology fails to provide a verification or a risk profile to enable persons accessing a social network, website or other computer-based application to determine the likelihood that people they are interacting with actually have claimed personal attributes, such as, for example, the claimed employment, profession, education, memberships and affiliations.
The present invention provides methods and systems that allow users of online social networks or other websites to better assess the identity or published profile of other users and to improved methods and systems for facilitating meetings between new people.